Toy manufacturers are constantly trying to design new and improved ways to capture and maintain a child's imagination. Unfortunately for toy manufacturers, there is no formula to decide whether or not a toy will be successful. In fact, in many cases, it seems completely arbitrary why one toy is successful and another similar toy is not.
For example, although there will always be a market for traditional dolls, today's most popular dolls are dolls that cry when the child pulls a string, dolls that laugh when the child pushes their stomach, or any doll that interacts with the child. The commonality between these toys is that they all interact with the child based on the child's manual inputs. Thus, any invention which enables a toy to more actively interact with the child is a considerable improvement over the prior art.
In addition, it is equally important for toys to interact naturally. Toys on the market today do not. For example, although it is natural for a baby to cry, it is not natural for a person to cause the baby to cry by pulling a string. Thus, besides increasing a toy's ability to interact, it is also a considerable improvement over the prior art to design a toy that interacts without requiring the child to intentionally initiate the response.
Another example of a presently successful toy design is the design of transformer toys. Transformer toys are toys that allow the child to manually change the toy from one form to another, like a toy that changes from an action figure into a car or a plane. These toys have been successful because they are really two toys in one, and they allow the child's imagination to envision the toy in at least twice as many possible scenarios. For instance, an action figure limits a child's imagination to a scenario associated with an action figure, but if the action figure changes into a car, the child may imagine any scenario which involves an action figure, or a car, or any scenario including the conversion of the toy from one form to the other. Thus, any invention which creates a new way to include two toys in one is a considerable improvement over the prior art, especially, if the toy is able to transform in response to a natural or indirect triggering event.
It will therefore be apparent that it is desirable and commercially attractive to provide a new type of toy which interacts with a child based on the occurrence of one or more natural triggering events. Such device would execute a plurality of automatically interactive responses based on one or more natural triggering events in order to automatically transform its shape. Such a transformation could cause the device to open to reveal an inner chamber. The effect would be to provide a child with a plurality of toys initially embodied in a single toy device.